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Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

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Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#371

Post by godelski »

I hate these economic arguments. They throw around big numbers to scare you away but really they aren't big. Let's look at the LHC, which cost $4.75bn to build and costs $5.5bn/yr[0]. This may sound like a lot, but also consider that it took a decade to build ($0.5bn/yr for the first 10 years). Then consider that it is a joint multinational effort. If you're a member state (European) here's what your country contributes yearly[1]. The highest is Germany which does 20% of the member state contributions, at a whopping total of $236 million/yr (it is in CHF, but it is almost identical to the USD so I swapped). The US gives some grants in the half billion orders but I am having a harder time finding good logs.

The other thing I hate about this is that the numbers reported in the article are clearly inflationary. The use the precise phrasing " It’s entirely possible that the price could swell to $100 billion." while highlighting the big number. Well let's check another source. CNET says $23bn. So that would require a 5x over budget, which would be quite high. I know HN loves Hossenfelder, but she is overly pessimistic. At least in my group of physicists, we don't know other physicists who like her much (not that I hate her, just more ambivalent). Pessimists are good, but they shouldn't dominate conversations the same way optimists shouldn't.

Either way, it is clear that this type of money is very small when we are discussing country budgets. It should not be inflated and should not be sold as if there is a single country buying it (which it is well cheap enough to be done. Hell, Bezos and Musk could each have one, or several. Hell, there's at least 20 billionaires that wouldn't have issues building their own and funding them for significant periods of time).

So the real question is if we should build it, not the cost. As a former physicist, I do think the argument for building one is weak. It is correct that we don't have any great things to test. But there are reasons to do so. We need to consider it will take at least another decade to build, which theorists will hopefully come up with something in that time. If they don't, we can still test precision levels which is highly helpful. But there are other intangible things that are hard to evaluate. Anytime we humans tackle difficult problems and push the boundaries of what we can do, we learn a lot. That's where spinoffs come from and we've seen them in every major scientific endeavor (NASA, CERN, LIGO, and many more). Also, what happens when you put a bunch of smart people from many countries in a room together? There's political advantages (and why I think it is a shame Bush killed the American accelerator). There's also the fact that if we stop doing this, we'll lose talent and skill. So yeah, the upsides aren't crazy good like finding a new fundamental particle, but it also isn't that expensive. That's the real conversation that needs to be had.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...

[1] https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.cern...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/science/cern-wants-to-build-a-new-23-bi...

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#372

Post by Georgelemental »

martin_a wrote: post #213
Georgelemental wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, that could never happen here , are you crazy? We're a prosperous and civilized nation! - Every prosperous and civilized nation's last words

I think the EU as a group of states seems to work quite well. Furthermore it seems like anti-democratic behaviour is getting punished now, too, if you look over to Poland. I'm quite optimistic that this will further improve.

> anti-democratic behaviour

You will have to be more specific, "democratic" is a grossly overlaoded term these days. When you write "democratic", do you mean "in accordance with the will of the majority of the population", or do you mean "in accordance with the will of unelected EU bureaucrats, the US Department of State, and media elites"?

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#373

Post by godelski »

cookingmyserver wrote: post #279
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yes it is, but where does this fundamental science helps in everyday problems? PhD or not, this is an oddly utilitarian view of science. I suspect there would be countless discoveries that never would have been made had we only ever weighed an experiment based purely on its ability to "help in everyday problems". I mean, why, say, develop the theory of evolution? At the time that was irrelevant to "everyday problem…

I think it is important to remember the context of the discussion. I think I it is completely reasonable, and not odd at all, to have a utilitarian view of science, when you are talking about spending $100 Billion .

> when you are talking about spending UPWARDS of $100 billion, split over 10 years and over a dozen countries.

FTFY

Honestly, these are country budgets. That's not an insane amount of money. It is Germany spending $2bn/yr at the 5x inflated budget but $500m/yr at the estimated cost (23bn).

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#374

Post by duped »

credit_guy wrote: post #338
XorNot wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That $100 billion doesn't vanish into thin air. It principally goes into plant and equipment to build the machine, as well as research into high tech manufacturing for the same. The world wide web which we are currently using was invented at CERN. You can literally go look at the proposal manuscript.

Where does this argument stop? 1 trillion, 10 trillion?

Ideally never

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#375

Post by saiya-jin »

dekhn wrote: post #354
eastbound wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noob here, can we discuss about what are the practical effects of understanding high-energy theories? ie have we invented anything practical based on those colliders?

There are some side-effects of running a place like CERN that benefit scientists (for example, CERN makes and stores antimatter for experiments, and they sometimes develop new tech to solve their problems that can be applied in the real world, but by-and-large, high energy physics doesn't contribute directly to applied science or products. Countries run projects like this for prestige, not applications.

I would add creating WWW as a nice side product of CERN. I am sure they do much more in their highly specialized fields, ie seen tons of stuff open sourced (but I am not an expert on this so can't say how usable it actually is to other physicists).

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#376

Post by marcosdumay »

eastbound wrote: post #346
marcosdumay wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me turn this around. A scientific theory is only as valuable as much as it can guide the action of some person. Popperism is an incredibly successful simplification that made it viable to judge a theory. But at the end of the day, it's just a proxy that nobody really cares about.

Noob here, can we discuss about what are the practical effects of understanding high-energy theories? ie have we invented anything practical based on those colliders?

I think the LHC was the first collider that didn't create any practical application from its main working. There were still spin-offs, but for a few decades the main research topic of high-energy physics has been entirely theoretical.

Anyway, this is not a large problem. Theories taking decades to give you any practical result is perfectly fine. If all of science gave quick returns, it wouldn't need government spending. The problem is that we do not expect practical results on the future at all, and also do not expect the next large collider to bring anything different enough to change the physics into a new, unpredictable course.

Or, in other words, the next big collider (as we can plan now) is probably way too small to matter. It will also be the largest scientific project ever (space and fusion projects included), and larger than most infrastructure projects on the world. It is a pretty bad picture.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#377

Post by _j5l3 »

Woodi wrote: post #251
martin_a wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the EU as a group of states seems to work quite well. Furthermore it seems like anti-democratic behaviour is getting punished now, too, if you look over to Poland. I'm quite optimistic that this will further improve.

Dude, what is your definition of "democracy" ? Because your opinion about Poland state seems to be really, really brain-washed. At best. Democracy as in free election ? Perfect democracy here - one party won twice, other parties lost. You call it a problem ? Democracy as in free speech ? Dude ! Wake up ! In Poland is so much free speech that it's boarding with anarchy ! Eg. almost decade of opposition internally and…

> Furthermore it seems like anti-democratic behaviour is getting punished now, too, if you look over to Poland.

They're saying anti-democratic behavior is being punished, which implies that Poland is pro-democracy.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#378

Post by dekhn »

saiya-jin wrote: post #375
dekhn wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some side-effects of running a place like CERN that benefit scientists (for example, CERN makes and stores antimatter for experiments, and they sometimes develop new tech to solve their problems that can be applied in the real world, but by-and-large, high energy physics doesn't contribute directly to applied science or products. Countries run projects like this for prestige, not applications.

I would add creating WWW as a nice side product of CERN. I am sure they do much more in their highly specialized fields, ie seen tons of stuff open sourced (but I am not an expert on this so can't say how usable it actually is to other physicists).

The web woudl have been created without CERN. If you have to fund a $10B accelerator to make the web, your funding model is broken.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#379

Post by tsimionescu »

XorNot wrote: post #309
tsimionescu wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also often said that science advances one funeral at a time. It's entirely possible for an entire field to be stuck in a local maximum and refuse to admit that they are not advancing, especially when huge money depends on it. A recent example is the amyloid hypothesis for Alzheimers, which has failed every single time it was tested in clinical trials, but is still being pushed again and again, mostly by a cabal…

Yes it's said a lot by non-scientist commentators on internet forums, frequently about 5 seconds before they push whatever bizzare conspiracy theory they've made their pet cause. And there it is right in this post.

It was said by Max Planck (well, not this exact quote, but the spirit is entirely there), not exactly a non-scientist commenting on an internet forum.

Also, the controversy over the amyloid hypothesis is real. Here [0] is a paper showing arguments for and against with 268 citations. Here [1] is a more journalistic article in Nature. While this is still up in the air, it's nby no means a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that it's possibly a 25-year wild goose chase, or close to it. I would love to be wrong about this, but I suppose time will tell.

[0] https://actaneurocomms.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s4...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#380

Post by hypertele-Xii »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #271
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #265

As someone who did their PhD at CERN - I agree. The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool. But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these disc…

> yes it is, but where does this fundamental science helps in everyday problems? PhD or not, this is an oddly utilitarian view of science. I suspect there would be countless discoveries that never would have been made had we only ever weighed an experiment based purely on its ability to "help in everyday problems". I mean, why, say, develop the theory of evolution? At the time that was irrelevant to "everyday problem…

> I mean, why, say, develop the theory of evolution? At the time that was irrelevant to "everyday problems".

"Charles Darwin discussed how selective breeding had been successful in producing change over time in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. Its first chapter discusses selective breeding and domestication of such animals as pigeons, cats, cattle, and dogs." (Wikipedia)

Darwin's theory of evolution was literally developed to explain the most significant food growing technique since irrigation. Seems very practical to the everyday problem of not starving.

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